I was invited to write an essay reflecting on the group exhibition that took place at the Alison Jacques gallery in London from 24 January 2025 – 8 March 2025. Curated by Daniel Malarkey – the first guest curator in the gallery’s Cork Street space since its opening in 2023. The exhibition brought together works by over 35 contemporary artists across three generations. The title of the exhibition came from the opening line of Rebecca, an enchanting 1938 Gothic novel by Daphne de Maurier, whose screen adaptation by Alfred Hitchcock won the Academy Award Best Picture in 1940. Rebecca tells the story of the protagonist’s visits to Manderley castle, a place that exists between life and death, personifies both heaven and hell, and compels change through defiance. These dichotomies lie at the heart of the narratives explored throughout the show.
To explore more about the exhibition, please visit the Alison Jacques gallery website.
Last night I dreamt of Manderley
The realities of the world affected me as visions, and as visions only, while the wild ideas of the land of dreams became, in turn, – not the material of my every-day existence – but in very deed that existence utterly and solely in itself.
“Berenice”, Edgar Allan Poe
For wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder.
Socrates
Manderley castle acquires its essence and its magic only when young Mrs de Winter enters its bounds and begins her journey, discovering its secrets room by room. Manderley becomes alive as she breathes life into it, as she awakens it out of silence, akin the ray of sunlight, fills with meaning the silk of the curtains, the intricate pattern of the wallpaper and the oak of the old beams. The castle doesn’t mind her presence, it welcomes her as the spectator of its grandiosity. While everyone else looks at Manderley through the prism of Rebecca, only she looks at Rebecca through Manderley – it needs her to tell the story. Manderley, in return, becomes a place of transformation for her, from a nameless heroine, a victim of circumstance, into a young woman capable of conjuring her own secrets within its walls. A protagonist and a narrator, she holds a crucial power within the story, awakening visual, emotional and even tactile responses of the reader and ultimately transporting them inside the tale, sharing with her successes and failures, emotional quests and tangled inferences.
Last Night I Dreamt of Manderley is a pioneering collaboration between Alison Jacques and the first guest curator in the gallery’s Cork Street space, Daniel Malarkey. It is the most expansive curatorial project by Malarkey to date, where he embraced the role of the narrator weaving a story never told before through the hands and minds of over 30 artists across three generations – from Alison Jacques’s roster, international galleries, estates, and the studios of living artists, – he brought together. In his own words: “As I was curating the show I kept returning to the book and how it marked me mentally as an adolescent as the ultimate gothic fairy tale”.
The gallery spaces have been altered with wallpaper, architectural arches, and even a viewing staircase over two metres in height. As visitors travel through the exhibition, each room is experienced as a separate chapter in the story yet together they make up a visual manuscript sewn together with historical references, visual cues and subtle suggestions. In a way that a powerful novel forces the reader to wander between the lines, enticing and carefully guiding us with snippets, omissions, and hints, the exhibition unfolds to the viewers gradually, leading them through the three gallery spaces, and allowing their own discovery of carefully constructed dialogues between the works of art.
The spiral of the Snail candleholder by Nicola L. in the gallery window brings together symbols for re-birth and thirst for knowledge in a fiery carousel, although this is just one possible reading of the work. Familiar and estranged at the same time, the form invites a personal interpretation, while tempting the viewer to explore the space with a childlike wonder:
I have been here before,
But when or how I cannot tell:
I know the grass beyond the door,
The sweet keen smell,
The sighing sound, the lights around the shore.
(From “Sudden Light” by Dante Gabriel Rosetti)
A portrait of Miss M (Maria) in the first room by Diana Cepleanu is a portrait of the artist’s daughter, who has been an avid reader of English and medieval novels since she was a child. Painted with tenderness of a mother’s gaze, the figure of Miss M becomes a visual representation for the emotion of wonderment and curiosity that defines the transition into the adulthood. The portrait placed in visual parallel to Theodora Allen’s The Starry Vault (Germination) II acts as a passageway into the divergence of perception between old and new, the never-ending loop between the origin of life and the unfolding of it.
The artists in the first room delve into the interactions between the body and everyday objects with an unfeigned and genuine wonder adulthood habitually takes away from us. Otherwise ordinary object are imbued with mythical powers through the interaction with the human consciousness – the glass slipper doesn’t exist without a beautiful girl leaving it behind, a sword is just a sharp tool until a knight pulls it out of the stone, and a mirror isn’t enchanted until the powerful woman desires to be the most ravishing of all. The threat of the scissors in the painting by Anna Calleja is felt through the fragility of the skin touching them, but within the threat also lies their beauty as an instrument of creation. The Epitalamio, or Bridal Song, by Lenore Tawney, paired with Calleja’s jewel-size painting, was named after a poem traditionally sung for a bride departing to the marital chamber after the wedding ceremony. Joined by the Pre-Raphaelite inspired wallpaper with the hypnotic sceneries of Maeve Gilmore, the ensemble explores the ritualistic sides of female experiences and the fragile border between surrealism and reality. Maeve Gilmore, an accomplished writer, doctor, pianist, but above all a painter and illustrator, published a children’s book in 1981 and illustrated it with dolls in collaboration with Kenneth Welfare. Her paintings, known to be autobiographical, relate closely to Tawney’s book collages that were often made from either her own writings, or the books she found important.
The remarkable sky-high rear space of the gallery, filled with natural light, has been transformed into a Cave of Wonders for the eye, where Leonardo Devito’s mice ride motorcycles, Tom Schneider’s winged mermaids defend their lair, and the yellow eyes of Roger Brown’s Bulldog Monument become a Brutalist personification of Cerberus set within a modern city, making the viewer question the premise of frantic achievement-oriented lifestyle. The room is anchored with Who is Afraid of Meredith Frampton? by Patrizio di Massimo, commissioned for the exhibition. The viewer is watching the scene through the inquisitive eyes of the child. Surrounded by the books read to Diana (di Massimo’s daughter) as bedtime stories, she transforms the world into a boundless playground, a strange place that provokes astonishment and demands explanation. The vibrancy of colours and textures in the painting accentuates the excitement of discovery, and in contrast with peacefully sleeping mother, unaware of the flurry of emotions, the viewer is drawn into the child’s restless enthusiasm.
Here in the room is also a 1991 work by Ernie Barnes, Pocket Pass. Part of the series depicting Black Quarterbacks, that became one of Barnes’ most influential, the scene is inspired by the challenging history of the position of leadership and power within not just the game of football, but also American culture. Paving the way for the future generations, the brilliant Black athletes occupying the Quarterback position represent a dream coming true through hard work, struggle, controversy, and fight for themselves and their team. In the painting, luscious muscular forms come together in a fierce yet controlled dance, and the fabric and leather of the uniforms become part of the body mirroring every manoeuvre and every thrust.
The viewing platform installed on the side of the room invites our participation, culminating in Tancredi di Carcaci’s Aeolian, a personification of the wind itself, set onto the unpolished Sienna marble with her hair fluttering through air, the bronze sculpture evokes the legend of Medusa and is in direct collision with Leonora Carrington’s Mujer con Zorro.
Finally, the viewer is led through the arch into the underworld, where Maggi
Hambling’s eminent portrait of Sebastian Horsley, presides over the space, both
intimidating and enticing. He seems to have been fashioned from the four elements of matter, the life itself. The Fire of his audacious red nails, the Earth of the bird’s nest at his feet, the Wall of Water, and the depth of the sea-blue of his suit, and, finally, the Air in the Hambling’s ethereal use of white make this work one of the painter’s most prominent. Horsley, who revelled in the intensity of his transgressions, titled his autobiography Dandy in the Underworld. Artistically, he was fascinated with the conflict between morality, religion, and the institution of the church that caused him, in 2000, to attempt his own crucifixion in the Philippines. That resistance to authority and questioning of the established traditions are at the heart of all the works within the space, particularly of the young Nigerian artist Chidinma Nnoli, whose work reflects the Igbo cultural identity through the artist’s personal experiences of trauma and healing. The women in the Nnoli’s paintings are floating through the landscapes, free-spirited yet confined within their own bodies. Nnoli draws inspiration, similarly to many other artists in the exhibition, in the Pre-Raphaelite movement, thinking of Ophelia submerged in water, and liberated and overpowered at the same time by the wilderness of the garden.
The two sculptural works in the Underworld by Jean-Marie Appriou, a French sculptor, were also born from the story of a ghostly Shakesperean character. Quoting the artist: “In the translucent cradle of solid glass of The broken mirror of water, Ophelia lies, elusive and ethereal. A delicate sphere, poised between the tangible and the intangible, holds her final breath. Inspired by the mystical glow of the Pre-Raphaelite visionaries, she transcends mere characterisation: a vision, a new mermaid gently slipping between two realms. This piece encapsulates the fragility of a single moment, the ultimate breath we sense, that rises and vanishes. Ophelia, caught between worlds, becomes a prophecy: a crystal ball revealing both future and past, dreams and tragedies”.
Isolated in the intimate space downstairs, the final arrangement of the exhibition, is a painting by Alexandra Waliszewska, the great-granddaughter of the fairytale writer Kazimiera Dębska. The work is placed across from the three vessels by Eleanor Lakelin, carved from ancient wood dating circa 800 BC. The pairing speaks to the materiality of age and time, underpinning the vital importance of every transitional moment within the never-ending journey of life.
While often adopting the visual language of fairytales through magical landscapes, imaginary beings, and extraordinary human abilities, participating artists explore darker margins of this age-old genre focusing on deception, bravery, defiance, trickery, wonder, betrayal, the complexities of love, and the battle between good and evil. “The show is extremely personal because it’s the result of over 18 months of conversations, studio visits and archival viewings” says Daniel Malarkey – “It was only towards the end of this journey, as I was preparing the invitation with Alison, that I looked at all the images and my planned curation and realised that my mind had been curating an exhibition about my favourite book from adolescence, Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier”.